9 Overlooked Technologies That Could Transform The World

What I've noticed is that most people don't really pay attention to "science" news, unless it's something that they can see immediately. I think this is at least partially because of the amount of news that comes out daily - whatever we may think about the quality of news, there is just a flood of it, which makes picking out "interesting" items difficult. When I talk about (just for example) the idea of gene therapy, most people think that it is still complete science fiction, as opposed to a very near-term product that will be available. Of course, CSP has been around for years, so it isn't really "new" to the average person. What they don't realize is the way that efficiencies have improved... And electronic currency is still in the "only oddballs use it" phase - people are aware of it, but mostly because of the issues bitcoin has had in the recent past. Finally, of course, for a majority of people, the only science fiction they think of it Star Wars/Trek, or (advanced!)

7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly)They Can't Take the Heat It's generally accepted by zombie experts that they're going to continue to rot, even as they shamble around the streets. What the movies fail to convey, however, is the gruesome yet strangely hilarious effect the hot sun has on a rotting corpse. The first concern is putrefaction.

Edge.orgAny first-hand experience of how scientific institutions actually operate drives home an excruciating realization: Science progresses more slowly by orders of magnitude than it could or should. Our species could have science at the speed of thought—science at the speed of inference. But too often we run into Planck's demographic limit on the speed of science—funeral by funeral, with each tock of advancement clocked to the half-century tick of gatekeepers' professional lifespans. In contrast, the natural clock rate of science at the speed of thought is the flash rate at which individual minds, voluntarily woven into mutually invigorating communities by intense curiosity, can draw and share sequences of strong inferences from data. Indeed, Planck was a giddy optimist, because scientists—like other humans—form coalitional group identities where adherence to group-celebrating beliefs (e.g., we have it basically right) are strongly moralized.

Re-Evolving Mind, Hans Moravec, December 2000Computers have permeated everyday life and are worming their way into our gadgets, dwellings, clothes, even bodies. But if pervasive computing soon automates most of our informational needs, it will leave untouched a vaster number of essential physical tasks. Construction, protection, repair, cleaning, transport and so forth will remain in human hands. Robot inventors in home, university and industrial laboratories have tinkered with the problem for most of the century. While mechanical bodies adequate for manual work can be built, artificial minds for autonomous servants have been frustratingly out of reach, despite the arrival of powerful computers.

Lisa TraficantiEvery new life begins at conception. This is an irrefutable fact of biology. It is true for animals and true for humans.7 of the Weirdest Human EnigmasMOST KIDS love reading the color funny papers on Sundays. As a kid, one of my favorite strips was "Ripley's Believe It or Not." It always featured some fantastic facts or coincidences. Often it would tell of people with unusual abilities, characteristics, or circumstances: a man with a birthmark in the shape of a perfect heart on his chest; a woman whose head was shaped like a Ming vase; twins with six ears between them.No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices"The laws of physics and the rules of math don't cease to apply. That leads me to believe that evolution doesn't stop. That further leads me to believe that nature —bloody in tooth and claw, as some have termed it —will simply be taken to the next level...

Some of the Most Plausible Scenarios for Alien Civilizations"It may even be possible for us to speculate the existence of common cultural and meta-ethical characteristics of advanced societies, namely the notion that technological societies independently reach the same conclusions about ethics, morality, and social imperatives." I think that's a pretty dangerous bit of speculation. I've long heard folks say things like "why would aliens want to visit us, we're savage and we kill each other" and "any advanced species will have learned not to be so crude as we are". That could very easily be bullshit. Assume, if you will, that Alien Hitler won WW2 on Theta 9 (I'm making shit up here, but it serves a purpose).

The Future of Privacy“We have seen the emergence of publicy as the default modality, with privacy declining. In order to ‘exist’ online, you have to publish things to be shared, and that has to be done in open, public spaces.” The terms of citizenship and social life are rapidly changing in the digital age. No issue highlights this any better than privacy, always a fluid and context-situated concept and more so now as the boundary between being private and being public is shifting. “We have seen the emergence of publicy as the default modality, with privacy declining,” wrote Stowe Boyd, the lead researcher for GigaOm Research in his response in this study.7 Lost Bodies of Work (That Would Have Changed Everything)The Rest of the Canterbury Tales Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is one of--if not the--seminal work of English literature, written by an author second only to William Shakespeare in influence on the English language (particularly when it came to fart jokes). Just about everything written by the man changed the English-speaking world forever. He basically raised the English language from its reputation as the barbarian dialect of mud-shoveling peasants to the lofty level of Latin or Italian in literature, poetry, witticism, satire and all manner of subjects concerning asses and the gasses that come from asses. So What Happened?

Thou Art GodshatterFollowup to: An Alien God, Adaptation-Executers not Fitness-Maximizers, Evolutionary Psychology Before the 20th century, not a single human being had an explicit concept of "inclusive genetic fitness", the sole and absolute obsession of the blind idiot god. We have no instinctive revulsion of condoms or oral sex. Our brains, those supreme reproductive organs, don't perform a check for reproductive efficacy before granting us sexual pleasure.How Self-Replicating Spacecraft Could Take Over the GalaxyI'm going to re-post here a previous comment I made on this subject, because I think it's worth repeating. Any alien civilization that is sufficiently developed enough to span the cosmos, will be so far advanced from us, that we would not be able to even comprehend their technology and in turn they probably wouldn't even recognise us as a sentient intelligent species. I've always found the "Well if there are aliens why haven't they said hello?" argument to be far too arrogant. There are islands all over the oceans of our world that are nothing more than rocks sticking out of the water with bacteria on them. We never go there because there is nothing there for us.

Legends Myths Initiation - American Indians Arikara - Lux OrientalisNumerous Indian myths of creation are built according to a scenario which reminds the first steps of our pattern. In these myths, a celestial woman falls from Heaven’s vault, usually after being thrown or after having been attracted through a hole located below a tree, sometimes following a bear. The Earth, by then, is covered by waters.7 Insane Ways Music Affects The Body (According to Science)The world is chock full of ear hurt that some people willingly refer to as music. The Jonas Brothers, Lady Gaga, Conway Twitty; they all produce high quality records and 8-tracks for our enjoyment whether we like it or not. But music--even terrible music--has a stunning amount of power over our bodies. For instance science says music can... Slapping neuroscience right across the face, music is able to take stroke, lesion or other brain-damaged patients who have lost the partial ability to see or speak and return it to them.